Can Anyone Stop Ken Cuccinelli? Here's how Virginia's pro-life, pro-gun attorney general could take over the Governor's Mansion.

At his swearing-in ceremony, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli begins his hard-right odyssey meeting and greeting supporters at the state Capitol.

Scott Elmquist

Ken Cuccinelli, holding a "don't tread on me" flag on inauguration night, was "tea party before the tea party was tea party," says longtime political analyst Bob Holsworth.

Scott Elmquist

The attorney general helps cut the ribbon at the grand opening of Colonial Shooting Academy in the West End in April, 2012.

Scott Elmquist

Calmer days at the state Capitol, during Cuccinelli's swearing-in as attorney general. The arrests of 30 women's rights protestors on the same Capitol steps two years later could potentially derail his gubernatorial bid.

Scott Elmquist

Cuccinelli addresses Mitt Romney supporters during a campaign stop at Meadow Event Park in Doswell the week before the presidential election.

Scott Elmquist

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by Peter Galuszka

It is a wintry afternoon on Saturday, Jan. 11, 2014. Strutting against a cobalt blue sky, a fife and drum corps dressed in resplendent red and blue colonial garb plays martial airs in front of the steps of Virginia's stately Capitol. The governor is about to take his oath of office administered by the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia:

I, Kenneth Thomas Cuccinelli II, do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia and I will faithfully and impartially discharge the duties incumbent upon me as Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia to the best of my ability. So help me God.

It's a surreal, if not bizarre, moment. Cuccinelli, a hard right-wing maverick, has managed to get to this position in a once-solidly conservative state where gradual changes are making it more centrist, if not progressive.

Didn't Virginians vote twice for Barack Obama, the nation's first black president, and choose Democrats for two of their last four governors? Didn't voters blunt the tea party movement that reared its rattlesnake head three years before? Aren't huge demographic shifts led by an influx of more diverse newcomers resetting Virginia's politics from red to purple to blue?

During these inauguration festivities, social conservatives and libertarians may be cheering, but others find it absolutely apocalyptic. Gay rights activists, artists, and social workers are stunned at the ascension of the former attorney general, who won fame for bashing homosexuals in state government and for staging a long and expensive campaign against former UVA professor Michael Mann, who maintains, like most climatologists around the world, that humans are responsible for global warming.

For women's rights activists, the scene is especially bitter. On these very steps nearly two years before, 30 of them and their supporters were manhandled and arrested by flak-jacketed state troopers and Capitol Police officers for protesting a bill that mandated women to submit to transvaginal ultrasound exams prior to undergoing legal abortions.

Cuccinelli, a staunch pro-lifer, didn't publicly support the transvaginal bill, but became a central figure in the dust-up over a new state law requiring abortion clinics be regulated as "hospitals." Pro-choice advocates say the law is a disguised attempt to shut down the clinics with cumbersome regulations. In another move seen as anti-gay, Cuccinelli has petitioned to keep Virginia's law making sodomy a crime. On March 12, the U.S. Court of Appeals struck down Virginia's law criminalizing oral and anal sex as unconstitutional, based on a a 2003 Supreme Court ruling in a Texas case. Years ago, such laws were used to target homosexuals. Cuccinelli has said he's appealing the court decision because the Virginia case involved underage sex.

Also scratching their heads are the state's Main Street Republicans, led by outgoing Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, whose carefully crafted succession plans were laid to waste by Cuccinelli's brash independence and clever moves. Watching intensely on the sidelines are national news media, which see Cuccinelli's campaign as a litmus test of how conservatives can come back after their drubbing in the 2012 elections.

How did Cuccinelli get here?

The simple, but wrong answer is that Cuccinelli merely tacked left of the center after Virginia painted itself blue and went for Obama in 2012. To be sure, the 45-year-old took some turns, such as siding with environmentalists against powerful state utilities for getting renewable energy ratepayer charges for dams they built nearly 100 years ago.

But this view diminishes Cuccinelli's talent as a political tactician.

"Cuccinelli is not going to move to the center on anything," says political analyst Bob Holsworth. "He's just outside the corporatist structure."

Indeed, Cuccinelli, who declined to be interviewed through a spokesman for this story, seems impervious to traditional Old Dominion politics. He has his own social code, of sorts, and his own strident outsider's view, which, reviewing his history, is hardly a surprise. With Cuccinelli, what you see is what you get. Just about every move he makes can be traced back to a similar one he made years before.

Bucking tradition, he has refused to step down as the state's top legal officer. The stance has proven problematic. Cuccinelli finally agreed to recuse the attorney general's office in a tax case involving Star Scientific, a Henrico County-based maker of dietary supplements. He did so after The Washington Post reported on March 31 that Cuccinelli holds stock in the firm and initially failed to disclose his holdings. Cuccinelli has said he has corrected the error. The Post also reported that Cuccinelli and two aides have used the expensive Goochland house owned by Jonnie R. Williams, the chief executive of Star Scientific, which has also given gifts to members of the family of Gov. Robert F. McDonnell.

Still, Cuccinelli is not to be sold short in politics. "Democrats are underestimating his potential vote-getting appeal," says Paul Goldman, longtime Democratic strategist and former state Democratic chairman. "Look at Ronald Reagan– no one thought he would win because he was too conservative."

Cuccinelli has already shown his mastery of tactics. One of the reasons he was able to finesse his candidacy within the Republican Party was a palace coup he helped stage in June. The central committee of the Republican Party, taken over by a band of arch-conservatives, voted 47-31 to nominate the party's gubernatorial candidate in 2013 in a closed convention rather than the open primary that was agreed upon in 2011.

It was a big win for Cuccinelli, and it set him up for the gubernatorial candidacy, because selection by closed convention is open to less meddling by outsiders. Primaries tend to be big-money deals with lots of political advertising, some of which is paid for by taxpayers. Primaries are also open to all voters, regardless of party. Shifting from a primary to a convention in 2013 was a major loss for the Republican establishment, including McDonnell and U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, who's played an enormous role in the fiscal cliff debates.

Going with a convention was the death knell for two-term Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, first elected to the post in 2005, when Democrat Tim Kaine won the Governor's Mansion. Bolling, a mainstream Republican, agreed to step aside and not challenge McDonnell when McDonnell ran for governor in 2009, with the somewhat presumptuous understanding that his turn would come in 2013.

For a while, all looked well for the McDonnell camp. He had an approval rating of better than 60 percent, televised well, and was able to recast himself from his social conservative views on gays and women from the 1990s to something more acceptably moderate. The grand plan was for McDonnell to be selected as Mitt Romney's vice presidential candidate in 2012. Bolling, a get-along, go-along guy from Hanover County, would smoothly step right in and serve the remainder of McDonnell's term, and assume the power of incumbency in the 2013 election.

It didn't turn out that way. Romney didn't pick McDonnell, in part because of ugly national fallout over the trans-vaginal abortion exam requirement that brought the state derision during the 2012 General Assembly. Romney's campaign proved a disaster and Obama easily beat him, shoving national and state Republican parties, including the Old Dominion's, into a swamp of soul searching.

With Cuccinelli seemingly firmly entrenched as the GOP's gubernatorial nominee, Bolling quit the race. He melodramatically dissed Cuccinelli on Newsradio 1140 WRVA, stating: "I question his electability in a statewide campaign for governor." Bolling eventually declined to run as an independent, citing cash and family concerns..For their part, the state's Democrats are only now becoming organized, and the best they've come up with is Terry McAuliffe, a Washington insider, environmental investor, schmoozer and former head of the Democratic National Committee. Well-regarded U.S. Sen. Mark Warner chose not to run again for governor, a job he held from 2002 to 2006, clearing the path for the charismatic Cuccinelli. Polls put the race at 50-50.

Most of the recent events are presaged in Cuccinelli's playbook, which fits his unyielding anti-government philosophy, except where it interferes with his views on sex, gays, and marriage. As a state senator from 2002 to 2010, for example, he backed strict conservatives and opposed allowing voters to participate in political primaries regardless of their party affiliation. Doing so would allow more moderates to participate and dilute conservative power.

He's been true to form on any number of other issues, such as his hands-off policy on guns, arming school personnel after the Sandy Hook massacre, forbidding children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States to automatically become citizens, keeping state funding for sex education focused on "abstinence only," and being the first attorney general in all 50 states to legally challenge Obamacare.

He's pushed for state Medicaid fraud investigators to carry firearms in their jobs that aren't exactly fraught with danger. Declaring "homosexuality is wrong," he's fought gay marriage and refused to support resolutions stating that gays shouldn't be discriminated against in state jobs, including those at public universities.

The same suspicion of government carries through on other issues, but with a twist. Cuccinelli fought vigorously to free convict Thomas Haynesworth after DNA testing found that Haynesworth was innocent of the rapes for which he'd served 27 years in prison. Cuccinelli later helped Haynesworth find a job. Other revealing and countervailing acts include declaring that high-school students shouldn't be required to pay $75 to take Advanced Placement tests, and a crackdown on payday lenders.

Cuccinelli is sensitive to the plight of the mentally ill. While he appeals to the anti-government conservative base, he's also pressed to restrict the mentally ill from legally obtaining guns, and has called for more communication between doctors and the courts in mental health cases. After Sandy Hook, he called for more mental-health funding.

He also handed $100,000 from his surplus inauguration donations to the Daily Planet, a downtown Richmond medical clinic that offers free health care to the homeless.

"Inauguration events," Cuccinelli said when he made the donation, "are certainly a celebration of the peaceful transfer of power in a democracy, but they can also stand as a time to bring to light the needs of some of society's most vulnerable, underserved citizens."

So what drives Cuccinelli's worldview? His background offers clues. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Northern Virginia when he was 2 after his father, a chemical engineer, changed jobs. According to a lengthy 2010 profile in The Washington Post Magazine, Cuccinelli dominated his two younger brothers in a bossy, perfectionist way.

Devout Roman Catholics of Italian and Irish descent, his middle-income parents found the money to send Cuccinelli to Gonzaga College High School, an expensive private school on North Capitol Street in Washington. Gonzaga is run by the Jesuits, a Catholic order known for strict academic discipline and strong belief in social justice.

It rubbed off. As a mechanical engineering major at the University of Virginia, Cuccinelli shunned his preppie Wahoo demeanor to help run a group supporting female students against sexual assault by male students crazed by booze and machismo.

After law school at George Mason University, practicing business law, and a stint as a state senator, he and his wife, Tiero, moved to a 10-acre property in Prince William County, from which he has commuted to his job in Richmond as the state's top lawyer. Their seven children are and have been home-schooled into the seventh grade. Tiero told the Post: "His priorities are God, me, the children and everything else."

Cuccinelli was once an intern for L. Douglas Wilder, the country's first black elected governor who shares remarkably similar ideas on government spending. Like Rep. Eric Cantor, a rival conservative with whom he doesn't get along, Cuccinelli shares a fondness for rap music. He also likes paintball and holds an annual private camouflage-and-splatter competition among friends in Loudoun County to raise political funds.

Mix together Cuccinelli's extreme social views with his in-your-face provocations against the state's traditional political and business establishment and you have a political race that the national media is dying to cover.

In a piece headlined "Virginia embodies GOP's woes," Politico recently noted the irony that Cuccinelli is such a powerhouse in an off-year election just after the GOP got an electoral drubbing, which many people blame on the party's social agenda: "What gnaws at Virginia campaign veterans is the degree to which Cuccinelli is already defined as a polarizing culture warrior at a moment when Republicans seem to be clamoring for kinder and gentler candidates."

"Cuccinelli will be a test of the internal Republican argument of how they can win," analyst Holsworth says. "They can say we need to moderate our message or our message is already moderated the right way."

While Holsworth insists that Cuccinelli won't budge on his core views, there's some evidence of him shifting away from issues such as immigration, which is now a political nonstarter, to issues that may have broader appeal.

In late November, for example, Cuccinelli issued a scathing report on a voluntary state environmental program called the "Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS)," which allows utilities Dominion Virginia Power and Appalachian Power Co. to charge customers extra for supposedly using renewable energy sources such as hydroelectric, solar, or wind.

But the utilities aren't developing much in the way of new and alternative energy sources, Cuccinelli's report says. Instead, they're using out-of-state dams, some 80 years old, to get the credits amounting to $15 million during the past two years for Appalachian Power and possibly $76 million for Dominion for that period.

The report got attention, especially because it came from an attorney general notorious for his attacks on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the climate-change lobby. Green groups have given their quick, if skeptical, approval.

Dawone Robinson, Virginia policy coordinator for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, praises the report but notes that the law setting up the standards remains unchanged. "The timing of Ken Cuccinelli's report is very interesting," Robinson says. "He did a five-year-review and he didn't have to. He did it, coincidentally, just as he's running for governor."

Pundits already expect money to flow during the 2013 gubernatorial race in Virginia, which has no limits on spending. The race "figures to be one of the most expensive in state history," wrote The Washington Times. Indeed, records from the Virginia Public Access Project show that campaign contributions to "Cuccinelli for Governor" are already coming in. As of December 31, Cuccinelli had $1,178,624, with McAuliffe totaling $1,039740. The figures are certain to change with mid-April reporting. McAuliffe, for instance, has picked up about $2 million more thanks to out-of-state fund-raisers helped by Democratic big wigs such as Bill Clinton, James Carville and Dee Dee Myers, Politico reports.

One out-of-state name stands out: Koch Industries Inc. The Wichita, Kansas-based company is the second-largest privately held entity in the country, run by Charles and David Koch, staunchly conservative billionaires who have bankrolled the libertarian think tank Cato Institute. David Koch donated $50,000 and coal giant Consol Energy of Pittsburgh gave $25,000. Other out-of-state funds for Cuccinelli are coming from Texas, Wyoming, and North Carolina.

Despite such powerful backing, Cuccinelli's campaign appears to have had its teething pains. Politico reports that the attorney general seemed to ramble at a recent Alexandria fundraiser. He also kept using the word "illegals" when asked about immigration policy, a complex issue involving documented as well as undocumented foreign nationals.

He has fierce opposition in some corners, including the women's rights activists who emerged after last year's General Assembly session. The grass-roots, pro-choice activists– including those behind "Cooch Watch," a blog that chronicles the attorney general's comings and goings– have become adept at reframing Cuccinelli's pro-life advocacy as an attack on women.

Still, Cuccinelli seems in a strong position given his colorful nature. McAuliffe is working to overcome his outsider image that helped him lose his 2009 gubernatorial bid in the Democratic primary to state Sen. Creigh Deeds (D-Bath County).

While Republican strategist Chris LaCivita, says that Cuccinelli will be "continuing some of the things that McDonnell has done," he did not specify exactly what, and Cuccinelli has opposed McDonnell on some major issues. He has come out strongly against McDonnell's major victory on his signature transportation plan that will define his legacy. The plan is the first major reform of highway funding since 1986 and would replace the gasoline tax with hikes on the sales tax and through other methods. It will eventually raise $6 billion for roads and other forms of transit. Cuccinelli has said that Virginians don't need more taxes and has questioned the plan's constitutionality.

For now, Cuccinelli has an obvious advantage as the ultimate contrarian candidate. His association with the now-diminished tea party movement shouldn't be a factor. As Holsworth says, "He was tea party before the tea party was tea party." If Cuccinelli plays his iconoclastic advantage as skillfully as he has outmaneuvered McDonnell and the rest of the Republican establishment so far, his inauguration could very well become a reality.

Peter Galuszka is a contributing editor to Style Weekly in Richmond, where a version this article and the photos by Scott Elmquist first appeared.

31 comments

Let's just hope this article's narrative fiction never becomes reality....

Marco Esquandolas April 11th, 2013 | 12:13pm

Let's hope someone can stop him...

Bob April 11th, 2013 | 12:22pm

Against my better judgment, I read this article. It becomes a cliche to reference "bias in the media", but there is no pretense of objectivity here. It is easy to understand why "journalists" rank below used care salesman in favorability. I'm not even sure I would vote for Cuccinelli, but I am disgusted with the spin here. The writer makes Rush Limbaugh look like Walter Cronkite.

Crawdad April 11th, 2013 | 1:16pm

Once again it appears the media has made up our minds for us. Call it a hunch, but I'd be willing to bet that the Hook wouldn't ever publish such a scathing commentary on McAuliffe. It's truly shameful what passes for journalism these days.

GarGal April 11th, 2013 | 1:20pm

Can any one person stop Ken Cuccinelli? Yes.... Ken Cuccinelli! Just let him keep talking and let reasonable citizens know what he truly stands for. We don't want to go back to the 1850s.

Dawg April 11th, 2013 | 1:44pm

@Crawdad, no one would publish such scathing commentary on McAuliffe because he is not an insane religious wingnut like Cuccinelli.

jimi "big name" hendrix April 11th, 2013 | 2:27pm

Dont need those wing nuts religious types preaching these days....eh Jeremiah Wright? Or the guy that played the race card to Obama on Easter. Oh wait, they are only wing nuts when the left sez it is so. That tolerant left who are, well so very not tolerant. Actually, they attack more than anyone...

Does anyone that favors abortion ask the pregnant mother who is keeping her child, "How is the fetus doing?" NO they ask "how is the baby doing?" Is it a war on women, or people who value life trying to keep babies alive? Perhaps it is the ladies using abortion as birth control, and please someone else need to pay, who need to be brought a little closer to the reality.

But yeah, another partizan puff piece masquerading as news. How shocking!

And dawg, you do know that Mac is Roman Catholic?

Crawdad April 11th, 2013 | 2:35pm

@ Dawg: i see, so it's justifiable to write a smear piece and pass it off as a cover story so long as you can label that person an "insane religious wingnut". gotcha.

J Ferrell April 11th, 2013 | 3:06pm

Of my goodness! Yet another vile, vulgar, God hating, rag head loving, humanist spilling his posion on a clueless population. Over half of what is written in this article is nothing short of biased fiction!!!

Bob... I'm thinking your journalist ranking didn't go quite low enough. How about we start at the scum level and work our way down.

Dawg April 11th, 2013 | 4:03pm

I don't know why you people think the article is a smear. There really isn't anything good to say about the guy unless you are a know-nothing religious zealot.

Says the guy who just spilled his racist stereotypical narrow-minded ignorant fear-based poisonous view about a good-sized proportion of the human race by referring to them as "rag heads". Compared to that nasty peek into the bigoted part of his mind, Ferrell's faulty assumptions and strawman attack are hardly even noticeable.

jeezlouise April 11th, 2013 | 4:48pm

I love the sound of screeching libs in the afternoon. Darn I miss Cheney.

Desertphile April 11th, 2013 | 7:41pm

"Pro-life, pro-gun." So, which is it?

amigo1 April 11th, 2013 | 10:18pm

I believe something called NORTHERN VIRGINIA will stop the kooch.

Angel Eyes April 12th, 2013 | 1:02am

Praise the lawd for NOVA and the fact that Charlottesville is a secure settlement established in the "South Bank".

Liberalace April 12th, 2013 | 8:46am

Let the bedwetting begin. Libs crying because this principled guy actually has a chance to win. Libs fawning over the criminal punk carpetbagger who will oppose him on the Dem side.

The lefties use "religious nut" in the same way racists use the term "ni**er." Go into many inner city churches (the ones Obama attends when it is expedient) and you will hear far-left wingnuts as crazy--or loonier--than the rightest of preachers. And while lefties will chastise right-wing religious hypocrisy (i.e., cheaters like Swaggart and Bakker), they forget Jackson, Jackson Jr., Sharpton and the many other lefty religious freaks.

This article paints Cooch in a good light...unless you are already of the "if it feels good, do it" and "make the rich pay their fair share" persuasion.

My lifemate and I will be pulling Cooch's lever this election!

R.I.P.: Irv Homer

Bushie April 12th, 2013 | 1:40pm

I'm no "lib," but I do regret that Cuccinelli so easily outflanked Bolling to get the GOP nomination. I fear it will cost Republicans the statehouse, either in this election cycle (if Ken loses) or the next one (if he wins and governs as unprofessionally as he has managed the AG's office). I was raised in the GOP of level-headed grownups, which in my view included both George H.W. Bush and both of his sons, George W. and Jeb, none of whom could win now in most GOP nominee fights. I blame the newer breed of movement-conservative radicals for the fact that the GOP is losing so badly on the national level. It is painfully ironic that, just as being taken over by radicalism cost the Democrats so dearly from 1968 onwards until Bill Clinton dragged them back to the center in 1992, GOP radicalization since 2010 risks confining Republicans to the back bench for several presidential election cycles to come. We really should be listening more carefully to Karl Rove, and stop letting people wearing silly hats direct our strategies.

The Hook’s latest cover editorial: “Can anyone stop Ken Cuccinelli?” Why would you want to? A better title might be – “Why Democrats cannot stop Cuccinelli?” How is it possible that an extreme far right wing radical Republican keeps getting elected in a liberal district? Who are these heretic liberals looking beyond party label to the issues? …Oh, I like that idea. It’s a Republican idea. I hate it…. All the Democrats have is party label just as Mitt Romney lost on party label. But Republicans, who speak to the issues like Ronald Reagan did, win every time. Cuccinelli isn’t the only Republican Democrats are voting for. Corey Stewart is running for Republican nomination for Lieutenant Governor in a field of 7 candidates. Stewart has explained his success comes from talking directly to the issues and to the voters over the long term. Now the new establishment Republican strategy is to target liberal urban areas by doing what successful Republicans have been doing for years. The Republican convention is May 18. I’ll be a Rob Bell delegate for Attorney General based on his 2012 Property Amendment addressing some abuses of eminent domain. Four years ago I was a Cuccinelli delegate based on his efforts to push back the abuse as soon as he was elected in the late ‘90s. Hello! That’s a bipartisan issue where Republicans stand with the majority on the side of civil rights. Why is Democrat for Governor Terry McAuliffe so afraid of Ken Cuccinelli? Terry has only party label and personal attacks.

Cvillian April 12th, 2013 | 9:21pm

Blair's been drinkin' the tea again!

I will, however, vote for Rob Bell if he gets his party's nomination even though he's a Teapublican because he had the good sense to ask for Chris Dumler to resign before most of the others, including Albemarle's own Democratic Party and the Republicans. He also got the anti dog fighting bill passed after Vick did all those bad things to those poor dogs. I will suspend my party sympathies for a candidate that does the right thing. I hope everyone is vetting these candidates. You can see what happened in the Dumler case when the Democrats didn't vet him carefully enough and the GOPpers did no opposition research.

Walter April 13th, 2013 | 6:31am

I think it is easier to get 47 people to have an extreme opinion vs. 47000. What seems telling to me is that extremes on both sides ( let's drop liberal and conservative labels for a moment) have nominated candidates that represent their viewpoints, not the majority. Frankly they could care less what a majority thinks simply because they don't have to appeal to them.

Maybe the solution is the elimination of the open primary. Make people in their voter registrations declare themselves as registered Democrat, Republican, any other official party, or independant. Then only the registered member can vote in the primary (or convention). I know some other states do this. That way if a party is truly extreme, then it can easily be identified as such.

Sadly, the extremes are not interested in ANY solution that diminishes their power, so I think we are going to continue that status quo.

C'ville Native April 13th, 2013 | 10:06am

And from the comments the phrase "You can't fix stupid" comes to mind.

Look at his record of threats, lawsuits and petitions brought forward which were dismissed or lost and the fact that his "convictions" shouldn't enter in to his service for "the people" at all. How much of our tax dollars were spent on his failed attempts? He is an impotent AG. I would never hire him as an attorney for his record alone.

He, along with many others are not the best choice for the people, by the people.

With his 7 homeschooled kids, Elmer Gantry simpleton religion, and stay-at-home wife, he'd fit right in like Bill on "Big Love". But for this corn pone nazi to be governor? I shudder to think about it, but we can always hope that someone out there may already have the video whose release will hit his campaign like that torpedo into the Lusitania.
All derisive comments aside, I do think the right wing wave that propelled this revanchist into power along with the current governor sort of crested in 2010 and I don't think his views will play well with the changing demographics of Virginia, notably the increasing NOVA population.

a55hatery April 13th, 2013 | 6:12pm

NoVa and Cville: pulling RoVa kicking and screaming into the 21st century

Blue Ridge April 14th, 2013 | 10:51am

This coming election is not a referendum on whether Ken Cuccinelli would make a perfect Governor. It is a choice between two candidates. And while Cuccinelli has his weak points, he is far superior to Terry McAuliffe, the "crony capitalist" Democratic nominee who could not answer basic questions about our state government in one of his first interviews. At least Cuccinelli has government experience and a solid understanding of the challenges Virginia faces.

Bushie April 15th, 2013 | 11:41am

It is improbable that if Cuccinelli wins he would govern as far to the right as he has performed as AG -- doing that would kill his political future, and given Virginia's term limit for sitting governors he has to be looking beyond this one shot. McDonnell, too, was feared as being too far right when he first took over, and then shifted to the center, although Bob has always been much better at the use of political charm than Ken ever can hope to be -- the men are just not of similar natures, class, or style. Like Bob before him, Ken would soon learn that he would have to deftly master the art of compromise, is he hopes to have any legacy come from the General Assembly, and if he fails to work effectively with the more liberal and centrist northern Virginia and tidewater-based legislators and power brokers, he would quickly become a lame duck.

Seannie O' The Hills April 16th, 2013 | 1:31pm

“I will maintain the utmost respect for human life, from the time of its conception; even under threat, I will not use my medical knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity; I will practice my profession with conscience and dignity”

Hippocratic Oath
Declaration of Geneva
Following the Nazi Doctors Trial at Nuremberg

dave manley April 17th, 2013 | 8:05am

Virginia needs Cucinelli now more than ever. What a breathof fresh air he would be compared to the utter foulness that is Virginia's current plight.

ruminator April 18th, 2013 | 4:05pm

This article brought to you by another vacuous and sanctimonious dork who thinks theft, envy, infanticide, cowardice, contempt for the rule of law, group think, hispanic slavery and biblephobia constitute "progress."

Bobby April 20th, 2013 | 6:46am

This article is an editorial, not a news story, so yes it's biased but what do you expect?

McAuliffe has nothing to recommend him, nothing at all, except that he is not the Cooch. Sadly, this year, I think that will be enough.

Dawg April 20th, 2013 | 12:01pm

@Angel Eyes, you have a way with words.

The Cruncher April 21st, 2013 | 2:41pm

"Most of the recent events are presaged in Cuccinelli's playbook, which fits his unyielding anti-government philosophy, except where it interferes with his views on sex, gays, and marriage."

What a coincidence, that's what most Virginians and any who aren't complete degenerates want. Despite the overall Republican sellout of the middle class, Cuccinelli is one of the few I will be voting for.

I also love the way elitist libs consider this a negative, more proof that they are hellbent on destroying the nation because of their daddy issues.